


lather the blood on your hands, romeo

by Pixielle



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game), Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: (death but not permanent death. just the way i like it.), Angst, Death, Dimension Travel, Forgiveness, Groundhog Day, M/M, Mild Blood, Mild Gore, POV Alternating, Soft Billy Hargrove, but is trapped :(, flayed billy, i just... i had to write the harringrove dbd au it had to exist!!, this be scrappy but i like how it turned out, who's actually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:21:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24208882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pixielle/pseuds/Pixielle
Summary: The night Billy gets flayed, he doesn’t become a mere pawn. He becomes The Flayer. He’s pulled into a vacant rift in space and time with only one purpose left: Kill Steve Harrington and sacrifice him to the Entity that encompasses this entire dimension.Billy didn’t want to kill. He’d never wanted that.But as usual, no one cared what Billy wanted.
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington
Comments: 3
Kudos: 58





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> (This is a messy/choppy timeline Dead by Daylight AU, but you really don’t need any knowledge about the game to enjoy this fic. Maybe take a peep at the Stranger Things dbd chapter trailer if you’re confused about some details? (https://youtu.be/_zRQA8W51sY). It’s just... My boy Steve is an actual survivor in dbd and the fact that there’s no Harringrove dbd au after what went down in s3 is sacrilege. I had to. I’ve played dbd for years and I /just/ watched stranger things for the first time so it’s all very tragic.
> 
> Also a bit of possessed Billy bc he’s fun to write and a Groundhog Day element.
> 
> For my DBD peeps: this has kind of a Jayers vibe so pass if you’re not into that? Also Max is totes a Laurie type in my mind, too, her stabbing Billy with the tranq in s02 is super Decisive Strike!)

_/// There's a place in the dark where the animals go_  
_You can take off your skin in the cannibal glow_  
_Juliet loves the beat and the lust it commands_  
_Drop the dagger and lather the blood on your hands, Romeo_

_Give me a shot to remember_  
_And you can take all the pain away from me_  
_Your kiss and I will surrender_  
_The sharpest lives are the deadliest to lead_

_A light to burn all the empires_  
_So bright, the sun is ashamed to rise and be_  
_In love with all of these vampires_  
_So you can leave like the sane abandoned me ///_

===

Steve was running.

He felt like he’d been running his entire life, unable to catch his breath but also unable to stop. The tunnels surrounding him were winding, and the ever present loud-rustle of vines on loose, dry clay deafened him to everything else. 

He had been the distraction, a disposable sacrifice to save the party from a terrifying group of those creatures. He’d done it without hesitation. Reckless to the point of self destruction, but he had nothing left to lose. There was no one left that loved him enough to make him stay, or to stay with him.

Steve’s sneaker slipped beneath him in his distractedness, and he anticipated the painful knock of his chin against the rocky ground for his stupidity, the end. But nothing came, no pain to his jaw and no slithering vines against his skin. The floor merely disappeared beneath him, a black whorling cloud replacing it. It broke into every pore of his body, leaving him shaking in the darkness as a dreamless sleep overtook him, the void swallowing him whole. He didn’t struggle.

===

Billy felt like he had been run over by a truck. He technically had been in a car accident, but all of the pain was internal. Head throbbing, soreness also afflicting his back and neck, probably a concussion, at minimum. He had experience with those.

He was walking through a seemingly endless cornfield. The environment around him was warm-colored but hazy, he couldn’t even find the sun in the sky. It felt like a fishbowl, or maybe more accurately a terrarium, but covered with a black sheet. 

Nothing more than a rat in a cage, down to being trapped in his body. 

It was moving on its own, compelled forward by a force he couldn’t see. Something parasitic. It was curling around him, his entire being, and when his head tilted down he realized he couldn’t see his feet or his hands. They were concealed by a black mist. When he brought his hands closer to his face, it moved with him and made his mouth water. The mist smelled slightly sulphureous, something like a coal or creosote. 

When he punched outwards, towards the row of dry corn stalks in front of him, it blew back from the force of the mist and emerged from it blackened, wilted and nearly charred. Almost like greenery after near-missing a forest fire. Was that what this was for? He didn’t feel any of the pain, it didn’t burn the back of his hands or the soles of his feet. It just existed, and his body could control it, direct it. 

As he continued to walk through the rows, a farmhouse emerged on the distant horizon, and it struck him what purpose the Entity was compelling his body to do. He was here to hurt, to inflict pain with this ability.

To kill.

Billy didn’t want to kill. He’d never wanted that. 

But as usual, no one cared what Billy wanted.

===  
…

“Billy?”

But the... person? Steve couldn’t determine if the being in front of him was truly a human at this point, or whether it had ever been. The blackness surrounding the both of them didn’t help, and he blinked repeatedly into the darkness. The visualization, the form, was undeniably of William Hargrove. The Billy Hargrove who had beaten his face in last fall. It made Steve wonder if they were merely sharing the same nightmare, or maybe they were part of some shitty brain experiment.

Billy continued to approach, not pausing in any way at his name being said. The environs around him began to appear as he stepped out of a cornfield that was maybe 50 yards away. Steve spared a look around and realized he was sitting on the front steps of an old derelict house, nothing really around, apart from farm equipment. He stood, balance adjusting to the dimensional difference as he slowly stepped down the stairs, and looked up to Billy who was finally nearing. 

His expression honestly reminded Steve of something out of Children of the Corn. It was the scary movie he’d taken Nancy to see last summer at a drive-in (a location that didn’t look much different than this homestead, just a chopped out grassy field surrounded by good ol’ Indiana corn). She had been bored, picking at her nails and fiddling with the radio. He was terrified by it, unable to drag his eyes from the screen. Apart from darting his eyes to look behind him, into the backseat. He considered himself even more of an idiot to have parked in the back row, backed up against the unharvested summer crop (even barely knowing the title).

Steve took a deep breath and was about to speak, a “Hey, man…” just behind his lips, when the impact hit him, head banging back against the bottom stair. Billy hadn’t laid a hand on him, he was at least ten feet away from him. But as Billy broke into his personal space he could see the black mist surrounding the ends of his limbs. His own vision was crossing, swirling, and vertigo set in as Billy threw him over his shoulder. There was no strain, no stress to him that indicated humanity, almost like there was nothing left but the shell. Even when Steve managed to hit his fist against his back, there was barely any wobble.

Steve barely managed a “...wait, Bi-” when the iron meat hook ate through his shoulder and chest. He struggled, held onto the hook to try to alleviate the pressure and kicked his legs. The pain- it was there. There was blood running down his stomach and soaking into his light wash jeans. But it’s not as bad as he thought it should be. The first sign to Steve that this wasn’t their actual reality.

Billy watched. Just stood, eyes hardened and glazed over. No sign of pleasure or happiness at his deed, and no smug smile like Steve had seen on Billy dozens of times. 

Steve didn’t know why he was struggling. He was alone, no hope of escape.

No one was coming.

Steve let go. 

As the darkness surrounded him again, he took one final glimpse at Billy’s face. Just before Billy turned to walk away from him, he could swear he saw a tear track down his face and fall to the ground.

===

Billy stalks into the abandoned house, down the stairs into the basement, and waits for his next instruction. At least his body does. Down to the military posture, hands folded at the small of his back and feet shoulder width apart. 

Actual Billy is still watching Steve die. Watching him being slid onto the rusty hook, feeling his body struggle under his hands, blood running in lines from his wound. Breaths are stuttering and Steve’s big, warm, deep brown eyes are unnaturally fading slowly to black. It was unlike anything he’d experienced in his life and he’d been in so many fights. This was not a fight. It was murder.

He feels… empty. Horrified and empty. The powerlessness, of both of them, it’s something he hadn’t fathomed when he was alone in this dimension. When he saw Steve, he was screaming. Telling him to run. But it just wouldn’t come out, he couldn’t say anything.

If he was in control he would be shaky and breathing heavy, and the physical disparity felt like he was closed up, not unlike a soda that had been shaken up and left in limbo.

The Entity descends above him, spidery limbs widening to a portal and swallowing him in darkness. Billy closes his eyes, feeling the remnants of excess moisture squeeze out and fall into nothing. In the distance, he hears… no, he doesn’t hear it. It’s like he thinks it, but it isn’t _him_.

It’s just there, with him in the void, floating.

**Again.**


	2. Ch 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Opening lyrics come from "Screaming in the Night" by Krokus, an early 80s heavy metal ballad that 100% encompasses the vibe I'm going for here (mainly bc themes and it's something Billy would angstily listen to, lmao), highly recommend! : https://youtu.be/aiEN_dgHXjs

_/// Sons of vengeance, can you rescue me?  
They got me tied up to an old oak tree  
They had me screaming and alone in the night_

_I'm beginning to see what's wrong and what is right  
The wolves were out and howling  
And I was cold and shivering and bleeding in the night_

_Screaming in the night  
Fighting for my life  
I'd die  
For you ///_

Ch 2

Billy didn’t know how long it had been. It had been so long.

He didn’t know if Steve had some of the same consciousness from encounter to encounter, he couldn’t tell. There wasn’t enough time. There was never any more than screams, pain, anguish now. But, for some reason, there was some degree of difference. The chase always… varied. It hurt Billy to see his body seek out Steve. Chase after him attempting to live when there was no way out of this for either of them apart from his death.

But those variants, it never seemed to matter, the outcome was always the same.

Even more, with time, there was less and less awareness. Awareness of his action, all of the environments surrounding them began to bleed together. 

Sometimes it was just outside, forested. 

The most memorable one was a forest with a hunting lodge that was draped in gore and animal carcasses. It always made Billy flinch when it appeared, quaking enough to force a slight twitch of his physical jawline. 

He found it ironic that that was what did it.

A swampy marshland with a huge derelict steamboat that reminded Billy of trips to Florida to visit his mother’s parents as a young child. They’d been choked out when he was about seven, an iron fist clenching around her fluttering wings. 

Billy regretted never reconnecting with his grandparents as he got older, if only in secret. It wasn’t their fault. Their house sat on the edge of a glade, numbers above the mail drop etched into his mind. It always beat in with the everpresent pulses of his heart when he was stuck there, hunting.

_724_

_724_

_724_

But it didn’t stop him.

Buildings processed and faded out as the time went on. Structures like hospitals, laboratories, factories, even a suburban house and a school. The school was obviously meant for small children, with small chairs and rainbow toys scattered everywhere. That was so far away from his mind that he didn’t hesitate. 

But the house, with its 60’s white paneling and large open windows, reminded him of the house on Cherry Lane that he’d run out of the night when this all started. It made him pause in his mind, the blast of black darkness missing the other by inches. 

===

Steve gaped back at the stutter, an inconsistency that he hadn’t seen yet from the seemingly untenanted being, the second thing after that one falling tear that felt like a lifetime ago. He was easily overtaken in his surprise.

He picked Steve up, arms still clenching around him like they always have. But for once, Steve didn’t struggle against him. At all. He hung limp, hands simply grazing along the edge of Billy’s jacket. Billy descended the stairs into the basement, lighting turning their skin red, and Steve clenched his hand into the leather at the slight jostling.

The hook was numbing as it entered his flesh, the pain faint and almost not there, nothing like that first time. He let himself sag down as he stared out at Billy as he stood a couple of feet away. His eyes were unclouded today. It was like he could finally hear him, screaming into the night. 

His arm, straining against the metal embedded into his shoulder, reached out through the space between them. He cupped his hand around Billy’s face, his cheek cold under it, and the moment his hand made contact a shiver moved Billy’s body forward minutely. Strike three.

Steve’s eyes flutter closed for a minute, feeling the clammy skin against his. As the Entity began to descend around them, blackness bleeding into the red, Steve sought out the Billy he knew was there one last time. His tongue is dry as paper when he takes in a hollow rattling breath as he attempts to speak.

“I forgive you, Billy.”

The last thing Steve sees in the split second before the darkness ate them alive was the widening blue of recognition in Billy’s eyes.

===

**It is done.**

Billy wakes up in his car.

As he leans back from where his forehead was braced against the steering wheel, he takes a deep breath. It’s the first autonomous one in what feels like years and he breathes a few more times just to feel it. He catches his expression in the rearview, watches the fresh blood trailing from where the breaking driver’s side window had cut into his forehead. 

He touches at the edge of the wound gingerly, and it isn’t deep at all, but when he pulls his hand back and looks down at the blood splayed along the pads of his fingers, he feels tears fall from his eyes. They don’t even pool before falling with his head tipped down like it is. He closes his bloody hand into a fist and punches the steering wheel. 

When he does tip his head back up a few minutes later, sniffing as he blinks the last tears away, he notices the corner of a cornfield. He lazily follows the tall stalks to the bottom with his eyes, looking at the uniform rows of tilling. That’s when he notices the head of dark brown hair draped over the edge.

Steve is on the ground.

Billy’s out of the door and slamming it closed before he remembers the window. He can’t bring himself to react to the sound of shattered glass remnants breaking. Billy strides the dozen yards, crossing the highway and a bit of grass before walking onto soft dirt. He drops to the ground at Steve’s side, hand darting out, intending to rouse him, before he hesitates. 

The front of Steve’s clothing is caked in blood. It looks old and dried, but it still makes Billy’s heart turn over when he sees it. It’s concentrated around one spot of his shirt, the left side of his upper chest. Billy swallows down the lump in his throat.

“... Steve?” 

No response. Just a barely moving chest, breathing fast and shallow like he’s in REM sleep. Billy touches his hand to the other’s shoulder, and it feels like a shock. He leaves his hand there, feeling it, not pulling away. He gently pushes against him and waits. The breathing stops for a short moment and Billy can hear his own heartbeat picking up in his ears. He shakes him again, (admittedly a little bit more aggressively than he meant to in his panic) and all of a sudden Steve sits up and almost knocks their heads together.

The “Woah!” Billy lets out as he quickly sits back out of his path is slightly too loud in the quiet of this dark field, but the echo doesn’t mean anything when he sees Steve panting and trying to get air into his lungs. Luckily, it comes quickly, Billy’s thumb on Steve’s bloody knee still moving back and forth slowly. When Steve finally looks up to meet Billy’s eyes, they just stare for a while like idiots, Steve still slightly slack-jawed and sucking in air. 

Billy’s convinced they’re both telepathically trying to ask each other the hard question that he knows neither of them want to. For some reason, that makes him break and smile, small and contained.

“Hey, pretty boy… Welcome back to the land of the living.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While I'm counting this as complete, I do have a bit of a third chapter written, but with how busy i've gotten I don't know if it will ever see the light of day. And this felt completed at this point, imo, the au is fulfilled. Hope my crossover fandom peeps enjoyed <3 Hopefully more Harringrove will emerge from me at some point! I love them and the amount of fem Harringrove in the fandom absolutely fuelssss me.
> 
> Ooo another fun fact abt this second chapter: I was in the middle of finishing it over last weekend and then was struck down with chronic pain and the only thing that prevented me from hyperventilating was listening to Huntress’ Lullaby on repeat. DBD really out here saving my life.


	3. ch 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> surprise! i finished enough of an "epilogue" to warrant posting, woo! just a continuation/aftermath/feelings party bc i love them 🥺
> 
> opening lyrics from Don't Fear (The Reaper) by Blue Oyster Cult.

_/// Love of two is one_  
_Here, but now they're gone_  
_Came the last night of sadness_  
_And it was clear he couldn't go on_

_The door was open and the wind appeared_  
_The candles blew and then disappeared_  
_The curtains flew and then he appeared_

_Romeo and Juliet_  
_Are together in eternity_  
_Saying, “don’t be afraid” ///_

  
Ch 3

“Can I… check…” They had been through about three (nonexistent) telepathic conversations in the past few minutes as they just existed in each other’s space to take in what they’d been through. Now Billy was emphasizing vaguely towards Steve’s bloodied chest.

When Steve sees the concern in Billy’s eyes, he nods before moving and pulling down his shirt, stretching it out from the collar. It makes Billy visibly cringe but there really is no saving it regardless. It’s like it’s more blood encrusted fiber with sleeves than it is an actual shirt at this point.

There is nothing but a few random, small, thin spots of dried blood. Billy didn’t really expect there to be a gaping wound in his chest with how he was acting but for some reason he’s still surprised. He’s just collarbones and moles and pale skin that looks cold under the huge ivory moon above them. Billy’s shrugging off his leather jacket and thrusting it over to Steve before he realizes what he’s doing.

Steve doesn’t look surprised, taken aback, upset. Nothing. He just pillows it against his lap for a second, blinking slowly and gives the tiniest shake of his head in what reads as disbelief. Billy wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been staring so intently.

“I… Thanks.”

Steve stands, shakes out the jacket, and puts it on. It’s a little shorter than it is on Billy but otherwise it fits him fine. Billy’s looking up at him from the ground and he’s a little ashamed of what he thinks when Steve turns away to look around at their surroundings and he can see all of his back pockets. He covers his awkwardness by looking away before Steve turns back to him. Billy unfolds his limbs before finally standing, too.

Despite his state, Steve seems to collect himself faster than Billy does. He puts his cold hands in the pockets of Billy’s jacket and emphasises towards the Camaro with his covered hands and a tilt of his head.

“C’mon.” His teeth chatter faintly as he speaks, “Let’s go see if she’ll start and get out of here. All this corn is giving me the creeps.”

Billy nods a bit choppily, somewhat pithier than he meant to be, but he just can’t figure out what to say or how to act, what to do to make it right. 

To make anything right between them.

===

Steve sat in the passenger seat, head pressing back against the headrest and grinding his dirty hair into it. The Camaro was going surprisingly slow, but that was all Billy. She had started no problem, Steve turning the key as Billy swept the few glass shards on the driver’s seat onto the floor mat with a surprisingly light touch. He saw the expression change on Billy’s face as he reached over to do it, but he didn’t say anything. Didn’t yell, didn’t scream, just let him do it. 

It was **weird**.

Steve doesn’t know where they’re going. He doesn’t feel like asking.

He knows he should get to a payphone to check in on Dustin and his friends. But somehow, he knows they’re safe. The world is still turning, there aren’t demogorgons crawling the streets, and he is alive. Billy is alive.

How, why, he has no idea. But it’s the truth.

Billy’s right hand is wrapped around the steering wheel. He isn’t white knuckling, or anything, but he seems… nervous. His left foot is tapping against the footbed, entirely offbeat and in his defense there isn’t anything more than faint, staticy, sad 50s country playing on the radio. Steve suspects he can’t even hear it above his thoughts. They’re screaming at Steve and Billy hasn’t opened his mouth since the driver door of the Camaro closed, errant glass audibly rattling and shattering more down in the frame.

“We don’t have to talk about it.”

Billy hums against his teeth, tongue sticking out absentmindedly as he bites down on it.

“If you don’t want to.”

A few seconds pass. The only sounds are coming from the car as Billy pauses at a stop sign, emphatically flicks on his turn signal and turns hand over hand, rings making egregious noises as they bang against the leather wrapped steel of the steering wheel.

When he finally settles back down, left hand trailing down to the 7 position on the wheel and his right loosely setting down on top of the gear shift, he sighs. Loudly. Bordering on obnoxiously, if Steve’s being honest.

…

…

…

Steve is struggling with how to approach Billy about this… their shared trauma. 

They had that now. 

Fun.

Billy’s sigh is back, but this time it’s softer. More empathic, or frustrated, and less… angry. Steve had known it had been at the situation and not at him regardless, but it made sense. That’s how it had always been with Billy. Explosions cresting out to the true frustration with himself underneath. It was always written all over his face, even if Steve didn’t always know the specifics of **why** he was like that.

“Or do we?” 

The stretch of county highway they’re on is empty, they haven’t seen anyone else in forever. It’s not in an ominous way for once, it’s just that they live in rural Indiana and it’s nearly 3 in the morning. That’s also probably partially because Billy’s sitting next to him.

And Billy just stops the car. It makes Steve jolt forward against his seatbelt and Billy’s arm comes across his chest to keep him from hitting the dash. Steve nearly wraps his hands around Billy’s forearm but he’s so startled at the jolt they miss and bang against the door and center console, bracing. In a normal situation Billy’d make some backhanded remark about not wanting to “fuck his pretty nose up any more than it already is”, Steve can almost hear it. It’d be familiar and, frankly, nice in this situation. 

But nothing about tonight is familiar or nice.

===

Billy removes his arm from Steve’s space stiffly and slides the gear shift into park. And waits. Because fuck if he knows what to say, or what Steve wants him to say. What they should talk about.

The wind coming sidelong through the broken window is cold against the skin of his hands and arms where his sleeves are pushed up, and he hates it. Not **because** it’s cold, but **because** it feels just like that awful writhing, pulsating black mass was. He shakes his hands for a second, begging his blood to heat up his flesh faster. 

As his hands come back together, Billy intending to rub them against each other for warmth, Steve’s left hand wraps over the top of them. And it’s like a branding iron. 

The sheer temperature contrast of it reminds him of when his father had pressed his palm into the fire of their stove top and left him alone screaming in pain on their kitchen floor. He was ten. That first year after she left… Was not something he enjoyed remembering.

But he’s not in pain. Steve has never hurt him in that way. Unfairly, sadistically.

If anything, Steve **should** do that for everything he’s done to him.

“I meant it, Billy.”

Steve’s voice brings him back. His hands are shaking under Steve’s, and Steve just presses down harder. 

“I don’t know how much it matters to you, if it does at all, but I do forgive you. For everything.”

The past six months, they hadn’t spoken. After Max’s warning Billy had truly backed off, stopped searching out the punishments he had before. His bloodlust was gone. At most they’d catch each other’s eyes in school, dragged together and apart by some unseen force, and then Steve graduated. He thought the weird tension was over.

The universe truly was fucked if someone like Steve kept getting forced towards someone as shitty as him. Billy didn’t really understand.

“Can… Can I ask, why?” 

“What do you mean, why? Why do I forgive you?”

Steve looks confused at best, upset at worst. Billy manages a succinct, “Yes. Why?” with the question graveled out in the quiet.

“You do realize I’ve never hated you? Or even disliked you?”

Billy hadn’t really thought about it in terms of love/hate. Rivalry’s weird in that way. Billy just shrugged, and tilted one of his hands to loop his pinkie onto Steve’s fingers.

“You were a shithead for a while there, but I didn’t hate you. You’re so obviously in **pain** , Hargrove. Every move I’ve ever seen you make screams out with it. And while I don’t know why exactly, everything that Max has ever said has been so vague, I want you to have time to be better. If not for me, for your sister.”

Maybe Billy can call Max his sister. Maybe she’d hate it. Maybe she’d resent him for it. Billy **knows** Neil would be so fucking smug, no maybe about it, and he hates it just for that fact. But it wouldn’t be fake. He realises she deserves to have a good brother, and they’re stuck together. So he can try. Really try.

Maybe he can stop acting for a while. Maybe he can stop being so fucking fake. 

Maybe he can let go of a little bit of that pain, feel something else. He might not be worthy of it yet, but who said he was a hero.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \---
> 
> (Then they have a chat abt how the Upside Down works, how it probably manipulated them into the vision and how it was real but not real bc US witchery, and then the crew frees Billy from the underlying possession like they saved Will, and he doesn’t fuckin DIE or have anyone else killed in the process. Ta da!)
> 
> ooo, another fun fact: i really loved writing this fic bc the hawkins at night aesthetic makes me super homesick, that midwestern gothic is too much, i love it

**Author's Note:**

> pixielle | tumblr / pixielle22 | twitter


End file.
